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Tom DBA writes "Bloomberg reports on claims that the swine flu could have been accidentally made in a lab, which are now being investigated by the World Health Organization. Quoting: 'Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu drug, said in an interview today that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said that he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint. ... Gibbs and two colleagues analyzed the publicly available sequences of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus's eight genes. ... [The CDC's Nancy Cox says] since researchers don't have samples of swine flu viruses from South America and Africa, where the new strain may have evolved, those regions can't be ruled out as natural sources for the new flu.'"
Time has a related story evaluating the World Health Organization's response to H1N1.

The drug cartels are rich. They get their weapons on the open (black) market by the container load, shipped directly to them or they use some of their fleet of planes or boats to bring them in. These are smugglers, remember, and *also* businessmen, they are going to pay wholesale rates direct from the manufacturer/jobber or they are stolen from the Mexican military (and the Mex military is more just an arm of the smugglers than not, same as their upper level so called "police" establishment). Do you have ANY idea -example-what a legal registered select fire AK is going for now in the US, and the hoops you have to jump through to buy and sell them? The smugglers are NOT going to be doing that and paying 3 grand for a 100 buck wholesale rifle.

There is no "gun show loophole" or legit gun dealers in the US who are selling fully automatic rifles and RPGs etc in mass quantities to be smuggled to Mexico. That is just so ludicrous as to be mega laughable. It's a stupid talking point outright lie the gun grabbers came up with. There's a few go south, that's inevitable given the nature of the business and the US insane prohibition war on some drugs, but I'd be surprised if it approached 1%, and most of those would be just fancy expensive pistols so that the various drug cartel soldiers can have little macho weapons to carry. The serious stuff is wholesale blackmarket sourced from asia and eastern europe for the most part.

There is no... legit gun dealers in the US who are selling fully automatic rifles and RPGs etc in mass quantities to be smuggled to Mexico. That is just so ludicrous as to be mega laughable. It's a stupid...

Ya, and many guns smuggled down to central america by rogue CIA and other (para)military jerks during their decades long support for tin pit dictators and wannabes, like the Contras, are still down there. Plane loads and plane loads of them. The are some of the same jerks who are part of the drug smuggling cartels themselves, when they aren't running renditioned victims to torture centers or doing other stuff like smuggling opium out of afghanistan.. So in that sense, ya, some the guns originally came from the US.

I will repeat, the BULK of the firearms, especially the select fire rifles and the larger weapons, are sourced down there to begin with because they have been in the area for awhile, or are imported from overseas directly. Some come from the US lately, but nothing like what is down there already and what is being imported from asia and eastern europe directly. They are finding weapons with no serial numbers. Not ground off numbers, these are production runs, directly manufactured without the numbers to begin with for just such sales. And a lot of the other ones can be traced from official US military sales to nations down there including Mexico, then they "disappear", they don't want to talk about those, because they have no defense for the abysmal state of inter nation gun sales to regimes like the completely corrupt Mexican Army and the various police forces down there. No telling how many death squad people got trained at the school of the americas where they were pushed off as righteous and responsible "military officers" from tyrannies down there, and they then got the weapons to do that stuff. Been going on for *generations* now. Places like that are where the bulk of the weapons come from, not private US sales. Big orders, overseas where they are made, or to tyrannical regimes down there in the past. That crap that proven liars like Pelosi are repeating that 90% come from the US and from legit gun dealers and "gun show loopholes" and so on are just more big fat lies. Some do, of course, but most? Not even close.

If it-it being any official announcement about anything important- comes from a government spokestard or bureaucratic lackey, put your heavy duty skeptic hat on, because the odds are heavy you are being lied to. I mean really, how many thousands of lies, big and small, does it take to sink in that they lie more often than not? What's it gonna take? How much longer are intelligent people going to keep believing those crooks and murderers? If they have an agenda to push, something that is controversial and important to them for pushing their globalist new world order crap, they lie to push it, that is their proven and overwhelming default behavior.

Put it this way, if you believe their crap about this, you probably got sucked into the Iraqi WMD BS as well. They lied about that, they lied about the Tonkin gulf attacks, both those lies lead to big huge wars, you think they WOULDN'T lie about something lesser than that, to get their civilian disarmament agendas pushed through?

I suppose even a stopped clock might be right twice a day. But still, there's a difference between man-made on purpose, and man-made by accident/human error. So all the tinfoil hat wearing brigade, can hold off on the "I told you so's".

"[The CDC's Nancy Cox says] since researchers don't have samples of swine flu viruses from South America and Africa, where the new strain may have evolved, those regions can't be ruled out as natural sources"

You know there's two things I've learned in my nearly 30 years on this earth.

Men often do evil things for money. Always have and always will. Now there's various scales of 'evilness' but near everyone does something at some stage that could be called evil by someone.

$5000 on the line will make some people murder and everyone accepts that.

Here's the weird thing:

$100,000,000 dollars on the line and a certain type of person thinks that *nobody* would kill for it. It's crazy! I mean you wouldn't even consider releasing a weak little flu on the world to get a taste of that sort of cash? If not that's great! Your a man of values. But there's a million men on the planet who *would* do it without a single shred of remorse.

Rapid anti-conspiracy nuts are as bad as rabid pro-conspiracy nuts. Both are absolutely delusional about the equally beautiful and grotesque mess that is called humanity.

And for god sakes man do you have *any* idea of some of the shit that big pharma has pulled over the years?? Something like this would hardly even be a stretch.

You know there's two things I've learned in my nearly 30 years on this earth.

30 years? Hmmm, that's about 0.000000007% of the age of the earth. I'd say you are qualified.

Not that I disagree with you, but let's face it: one other aspect of being human (in addition to your 'evil' conjecture), is that we believe not what the facts bear out but rather what the facts bear out that reinforces what we already believe.

In my almost 37 years I have realized that virtually nothing is 100% provable, and therefore virtually everything is open to some level of interpretation, depending on the interpreter's level of delusion.

No matter what "facts" are released to the public there will be people on both sides of the argument backing up their respective positions, and there will be nothing to convince them otherwise.

1) Because they would: they did.2) Because 'anti-conspiracy' people are nut jobs: you can't argue they didn't release the flu.3) Because some pharma companies did questionable things in the past: this company is doing questionable things now.

Your claims are backed by nothing but wild speculation and logically flawed arguments.

People doing evil things for money is not what makes conspiracy theories so unlikely to be true.People do evil things for money all the time. People do evil things for free all the time, so we certainly don't need the added incentive of money.

Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of. That can be done for a short time, but eventually every secret that has more than about 3 people in on it comes out.

Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of. That can be done for a short time, but eventually every secret that has more than about 3 people in on it comes out.

And if you ever had an affair, you know what the parent is talking about.

Ah, never mind, this is slashdot.

but seriously though, a nice scientific heuristic concerning conspiracy theories is that they all violate ocams razor...

"Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of. That can be done for a short time, but eventually every secret that has more than about 3 people in on it comes out."

Thank you. I've always been amazed by theories that posit that a cabal of people are so sophisticated that they are completely fooling everybody in the world - EXCEPT those with such clarity of vision and ac

D-day was kept quiet, as was the Manhattan project. The bluebird was a secret and how many thousands of men were involved in the design and production of that? The 9/11 Hijackers managed to keep their plans to themselves.

What's the exact recipe for Coke a Cola? By your logic it would be out in the open by now. There's thousands of people who would have knowledge of it.

In any case what makes you think that something like this needs large numbers of people? One person could just as easily pull it off, even if only a crackpot scientist ala the anthrax scares.

There's plenty of things that happen because of incompetence or just sheer bad luck. But there's plenty of things that happen that were indeed planned (if only guided) by men.

Saying that there's never a conspiracy is naive and ridiculous especially when it's based on some trite self-styled conventional wisdom that people can't keep secrets when with the correct motivation they clearly can.

What happens if you violate that secrecy: The Germans or the Japanese win; You spend the rest of your life as a traitor in exile, or receive a long all-expenses paid visit at Fort Leavenworth, or the death penalty.

The 9/11 Hijackers managed to keep their plans to themselves.

What happens if you violate that secrecy: The 9/11 Hijackers' plan fails, and they do not become martyrs. They go to jail or are handed back to some country for whom waterboardin

"When 4 people sit down to discuss conspiracy, 3 are government agents and the 4th is a fool."
-- old Soviet aphorism

I read stuff like "someone created swine flu on purpose" and consider that anyone with a smattering of virology (including myself) are laughing so hard we'll all need to be hospitalized, or perhaps committed... yep, it's a conspiracy to get rid of all the virologists, so they can put their evil plan for viral domination in place!

Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of.

Although you're right when it comes to 99% of conspiracy theories, in this case _your_ train goes off the rails assuming you need 'massive numbers of people' to pull off engineering a new influenza virus and setting it free. All it takes is a few execs who know a few scientists they can blindly trust, and if everyone involved knows that all the others share the same evil ethics, it isn't unlikely at all a scheme could be devised to create a virus like this without anyone else knowing about it. I'd say you'd need no more than 10 people, probably less.

Try googling seroquel if you think the pharmacy industry doesn't do evil things and tries to cover them up afterwards. It's an anti-deprissant that showed serious health risks and side-effects in preliminary lab studies. These studies somehow dissappeared, the side-effects where never mentioned on any package leaflet, and the drug was approved in multiple countries. Many people who used this drug developed diabetes or ended up seriously overweight, exactly the side-effects described in the lab studies, until these studies somehow surfaced, years later. You explain me how it would be more difficult to cover up creating a new strain of influence, than to have lab studies dissappear in order to get your drug approved.

You know there's two things I've learned in my nearly 30 years on this earth.

Here's one thing I've found to be true on my slightly longer years on this earth.

Reasoning purely using peoples motivations and what's _possible_ without looking for actual evidence to support your conclusions will turn you quickly into a conspiracy nut. Conspiracy theories always seem to have at their base the motivations of the people involved. Any "evidence" is always secondary, and contrary evidence is ignored.

Rapid anti-conspiracy nuts are as bad as rabid pro-conspiracy nuts. Both are absolutely delusional about the equally beautiful and grotesque mess that is called humanity.

Not even close sir. Conspiracy theories are such because they have so little evidence to back them up. If there were solid logic or evidence behind the conspiracy theory, it would cease to be a conspiracy theory. The number of conspiracy theories that are proven correct compared to the ones that were proven false are staggeringly small. At least the rabid anti-conspiracy nuts have statistics and logic on their side.

This isn't to say that conspiracies can't be correct or that they shouldn't be investigat

> They don't have samples from Transylvania, where the flu may have evolved, either. They have viruses there, right?

Yes, but they probably do have samples from that region. They don't have samples from Mars, and it has been posited that life on Earth originated from Mars, thus if you anti-conspiracy nuts deny the Great Martian H1N1 conspiracy you're all fools!

But still, there's a difference between man-made on purpose, and man-made by accident/human error. Yeah, yeah... never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidty... however:

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Furthermore, I may be slightly paranoid, and I know I'm jaded and cynical, but I simply don't believe that a company that makes a flu treatment "accidentally" releases a virulent disease upon the public. If it was gross negligence that allowed this to ha

"...a virus released to raise some money isn't surprising at all."What proof is there? Sure, it could possible happen, but how about some fucking proof? oh right, some things happened before, therefore you don't need proof.

Even if this one isn't, scientists ARE creating lethal strains of H1N1 (aka Spanish Flu/Swine Flu) in the lab. In fact, in 2007, they succeeded in creating an H1N1 variant that kills monkeys in the same way Spanish Flu killed humans. They hope to study how to fight it off, so they will be prepared for another major pandemic. Now, I doubt very much that this is one of them. But don't assume they aren't making them, because they are, and it's not even a secret.

It would be incredibly stupid to release it near to the point of creation, and it would be even dumber to not take the tenth of a second to realize this before posting a comment on the subject. With that said, the smartest place to release it would probably be outside the lab of a competitor researching the same or a similar virus. But even more to the point, releasing a swine flu in Mexico is entirely plausible. If you broke it out in Switzerland you'd have a lot of work to do to convince people.

I've heard some far out conspiracy theories, but creating a mild flu in a lab and then transported out to Colillacarajo, Mexico? That's just dumb.

Yes, because it would make far more sense to release it right near the lab, of course... nobody would *ever* guess *then*. Also, it makes much more sense to release it in a country far better prepared to not only contain any outbreak rapidly, but also far better able to analyse the genetic make-up and origins, in addition to analysing the spread of the disease for further clues on its origins.

Actually, if you think about it for more than five seconds, if you *are* part of such a "conspiracy", it makes perf

Forensic Health Investigator: Vaccine Company X, um, did you deliberately engineer the Swine Flu Influenza so as to make obscenely huge amounts of money by selling the only cure?VCX: What? Nooooooooooooo, don't be ridiculous!FHI: Well, um, it looks like you did engineer it and all...VCX: Okay, FHI? Try to give us a little credit here. If we were going to start a pande

On the maybe-inna-lab side, if you didn't want to be discovered you'd release it in an area where you'd reasonably expect a new disease to be discovered: a rural area where people, chickens, and swine live in comparatively close proximity. (And Mexico is an extra plus because it's much easier to smuggle samples from US labs to Mexico than to India or China: you just drive.)

On the other hand, the CDC is spending some time and money investigating claims that the first cases were actually in San Diego in Sept

If the symptoms can be believed (and the projectile vomiting seems definitive enough), this "new flu" was here in north Los Angeles County last fall.

It wouldn't surprise me if the actual direction of travel was from LA to SD and thence into Mexico, where it became a News Story because it hit Mexico a lot harder thanks to its currently atrocious living conditions.

I've heard some far out conspiracy theories, but creating a mild flu in a lab and then transported out to Colillacarajo, Mexico? That's just dumb.

IIRC, that is precisely the plot for one of the episodes in season one of ReGenesis. Just because it was manufactured in a lab doesn't mean it was released on purpose. Whose to say that there isn't a "lab" out in the boonies - depending on what they are studying they may need some arable land in order to test grow some of their other experiments. One foul-up in their safety procedures and the wrong samples get released into the wild...

I quibble - the virus is NOT mild. It is at least 10 times more lethal than seasonal flu (and that's including treatment with Tamiflu), and 10 times more likely to land you in the hospital. People are only calling it mild because it doesn't have the lethality of H5N1.

Actually, I think the reason it was so widespread in Mexico was the Sunday communion at Church. Seeing that Mexico is primarily Catholic, one can assume they share that wine on Sunday morning. Now if you have ever participated you know that the most they do is wipe the chalice with a napkin or something.

So my best guess is that someone had the flue went to communion and got everyone sick.

That's why we have individual little beakers (I forget what they're called) in the U.S., at least at every church I've seen in the past 50 years. It was recognised that sharing spit was a disease vector, and a needless risk to the congregation.

And as I mention above -- we had this flu (if one can define it by the symptoms) in north L.A. County last fall. Chances are it went south, not north, and given conditions in Mexico, quickly became a News Story -- despite being nothing so odd while it was still in the

Umbrella Corporation releases an apology saying its really, really sorry for unleashing the pandemic flu on the world. They do however guarantee they are taking the appropriate steps to ensure nothing like this will ever happen again.

Quick I need to hire some writers to do the 'Disease of the Week' movie for cable TV. Now who can I get cheap to play the evil scientists. I wonder if I could get George W. and Dick C., I hear they are currently unemployed or would that be type casting?

Only if it can be exposed within minutes of torturing everyone they come across, the bad guys have a mole in the Counter Terrorism Unit, and the nature of the threat changes 12 hours into the investigation.

Here's a fun conspiracy theory: The real illness that actually kills people is on hot standby, and this was just a test to see what infection/spread rates would be like. They're just tuning the process to produce their desired results.

There is a side effect though. If you got sick in the last run, expect to get sick in the next one... or plan to move before then.

I'm not actually advancing this theory as reality, but it's still tempting to think about planning for it.

The problem with these conspiracy theories is this single and simple flaw. You have to bring people in on the conspiracy to create it and set it in motion. In this sue happy world, you can bet your ass that at least one person "in on it" will blow the whistle. Maybe not for personal gain but at least to see someone burn. If these people are "evil" and cooking a world altering conspiracy, they would probably have no qualms cutting 401k's or health benefits of the other workers. This would be easily enou

"This is how science progresses," he said. "Somebody comes up with a wild idea, and then they all pounce on it and kick you to death, and then you start off on another silly idea."-- the Author of the Study, Adrian Gibbs, 75,

A Virus of such evil that can make most of the population miserable for about a week. However because of a catchy name, and the few people who did die from it didn't quite fit the normal flu victim profile.

Such a thing must be a human fault for creating such a weapon of mass annoyance. Or... It could just be what happens naturally in the word.

I was laughing about it (the conspiracy us government release of HIV story), until I talked to a friend of mine doing research in retroviruses... and he got a real thoughtful look on his face and said "you know..."
So, I wouldn't put it past anyone to release a virus... by mistake or on purpose.

I know the feeling. I worked for architects and structural engineers who designed buildings of all types including giant ones like the twin towers... they think the way they buildings fell were rather suspect. These are people who know how things are built and demolished.

Anon because I played a role in what will be the official response to this claim.

This claim is bullshit. There is *no evidence* to support his claims.

Science progresses when you come up with a credible theory. It makes testable claims based on actual evidence, the current theories fail to explain it, and you have to come up with a new explanation.

This isn't that. This is just a silly idea. It generates press, it eats up valuable time from the members of the flu community, and it will amount to nothing.

No one denies that the current virus is weird. But weird doesn't mean man-made. This is not the first time that Adrian Gibbs has been at odds with the flu community, and he is yet to present credible scientific claim based on fact.

The burden of proof lies with the person who puts forward the wild idea. Once you know that reassortant viruses like this one have been in the swine population for at least the last 10 years, and that the most recent pandemic virus (1968) also came from swine, it is going to take a mountain of evidence to prove this.

It would be impossible to prove that this virus didn't come from a man-made source, so the tin-foil hat brigade will never be satisfied.

For the rest of the population - this is a media grab attempt, and has no basis in fact. Please treat it as such.

There is a book that links a US government lab with the creation and US release of a large number of diseases. It read it. It was an interesting read. Try it yourself. http://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Laboratory/dp/006078184X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242233395&sr=8-1

Even if this were true, does that mean we should stop doing research on virus and vaccine ? Of course not !

Maybe confinment of labs should be improved if this were proven to be true. However, I prefer to live in the XXI century where smallpox has been eradicated thanks to Pasteur rather than banning all this research and having a life expectancy of 40 years.

It seems unlikely that this one was made in a lab, by accident or otherwise. Pigs, which swap Influenza both with humans and passing birds, are a natural place for this sort of mixing to occur. But given that it could have happened by a double accident in a sloppy lab (first getting two strains into the same egg, then getting a worker exposed to the result before it's harvested and killed to make vaccine material) it's worth checking.

But announcing it this way just broke security-by-obscurity on a way to make a pandemic on-the-cheap. Fertile eggs, samples of live viruses you want to hybridize, and a minimum of additional equipment and it's something virtually anybody with a spare room and a bit of time and effort could do. As a side-effect it gives them the material to make a vaccine for their own people in the process, long before the virus needs to be tried out on test subjects to test for virulence.

So while this one is no doubt an accident - most likely in the wild, MAYBE in a vaccine lab - don't be surprised if a later one is not. The press coverage of this speculation just showed the world how to replicate the first chapters of "The Stand" on a minimal budget.

Lab Sr.: Who is on first?
Lab Jr.: No, but I know WHO is investigating us for the swine flu.
Lab Sr.: I must know, tell me who is investigating us?
Lab Jr.: I am telling you, WHO is investigating us.
Lab Sr.: Don't question me, who is investigating us?!
Lab Jr.: WHO is! WHO is investigating us!
Lab Sr.: That's what I am trying to find out, why won't you tell me WHO is investigating us.
Lab Jr.: Nevermind, who is on first?

Actually perfectly rational events being labeled 'conspiracy theories' by smug self entitled 'intellectuals' who sit inside and push buttons to make other people rich all day and night is the best part of Slashdot.

Here's a 'crazy conspiracy theory' example:

A big pharma company released a drug that it knew caused more heart attacks than it stopped and when scientists started critising the drug the company drew up a hit list and set out to discredit and destroy the careers and lives of anybody on the list.

Many government stockpiles of Tamiflu from the last pandemic that according to the "experts" was dead set going to "wipe us out" (lol) are expiring right now. Many governments were *not* going to restock to previous levels due to the enourmous cost [google.com].

Guess that's changed now huh?

Roche might just have the best marketing department in the world. Even better than Merck [google.com] - Just incase *anybody* tries to make excuses that nobody would stoop so low as to do as the article suggests on purpose, there's the type of entity being dealt with so check your "never attribute incompetence to malice" mindless drek at the door thanks (just preempting, sorry).

Many government stockpiles of Tamiflu from the last pandemic that according to the "experts" was dead set going to "wipe us out" (lol) are expiring right now. Many governments were *not* going to restock to previous levels due to the enourmous cost [google.com].